I get knocked a little bit when I talk to my friends about Hidden Figures. The Ted Melfi (St. Vincent) directed movie based on the untold story of Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson – Hustle & Flow, Four Brothers), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer – The Help, Snowpierecer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe – Moonlight, Made in America) as brilliant African-American women who were hired by NASA and who served as the brains behind the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race and galvanized the world. When I rip on the movie a little bit, it is not because I think it is not good, but rather because it’s just a little too predictable and too PG for me. While I really do enjoy and recognize a movie based on a true story, I appreciate a darker, edgier movie that much more. When I say a movie is too Disney for me, it doesn’t have anything to do with Disney at all. It has to do with a movie being too toned down for my jaded self to be able to appreciate it. And, unfortunately, that’s my feeling on Hidden Figures. Based on the preview alone, I had no intention of seeing it unless it got nominated for best picture. When it did, I reluctantly dragged myself to the theater and even paid the extra three dollars because it was playing in my theater’s featured auditorium. With all of that said, Hidden Figures is by no means a bad movie. It just felt like a “been there, done that” type of movie for me. I feel like I’ve seen movies about overcoming adversity, fighting segregation, achieving a goal in the eleventh hour, and much more of what this movie does. In fact, I’m often drawn to this type of movie. But, as someone who sees movies a lot, I just feel like I’ve seen this exact movie a lot recently, and it just lacked the intensity and edge that I appreciate at this point in my life.
What stood out the most to me in this movie was Melfi’s ability to get us to know so many of the story’s characters so well. Although, at the same time, Katherine is certainly the lead (there would be no movie without her impactful contributions to the goal of putting Glenn into orbit, we get to know the other characters extremely well. This includes both Dorthy and Mary, but also supporting characters such as Katherine’s love interest Colonel Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali – Moonlight, Free State of Jones), Al Harrison (Kevin Costner – Field of Dreams, For Love of the Game), her boss in the NASA control, Harrison’s head engineer Paul Stafford (a nearly unrecognizable Jim Parsons – CBS’s The Big Bang Theory), and Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst – Spider-Man, Melancholia), the strict supervisor who is constantly challenging Dorthy for no other reason than she is a person of color who she feels threatened by. Each of these characters is rich in its development, and each serves a purpose unique to the story. Not all of the characters are based on real people. For example, Dunst’s Mitchell represents a successful working white woman working with persons of color for the first time in her life. Costner’s Harrison is a composite of three different directors who worked at NASA during Katherine’s time.
Katherine was a natural mathematician, solving even the most complex calculations when she was just an elementary school child in 1926 West Virginia. Though her parents are poor, Katherine is given a scholarship to a gifted school and some money for her family to move closer to the school. Katherine is asked to skip a few grades since she is already far ahead of students 5+ years older than her in math and science. We meet her again in 1961 when she, Dorothy, and Mary report for their first day of work at NASA. The Russians are currently ahead in the space race, having just launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. The desperate Americans are pulling out all of the stops and thus are willing to bring in women and African Americans into positions that were not held by them before, feeling the pressure of justifying a space program that has been unsuccessful in putting anything into space yet.
The three women work at the West Area Computers division of the Center, segregated from Langley Research Center, along with many other black women who work as “computers,” doing math by hand. They all have goals in their professional lives that they want to accomplish. Katherine wants to use her math skills to help bring the space program. Mary longs to go to college to get a degree in engineering, but the only college that offers an engineering major to women of color is too far away. Knocking down the obstacles that obstruct her from attending the school becomes one of her obsessions. Until then, she has to settle for assisting them. Dorthy desires to be a supervisor, but the closest she gets is giving out new assignments to the group.
One day, when Harrison feels that his team has exhausted all of his resources, he asks Vivian to go to the group of assistants to say that the Space Test Group needs a new computer. Katherine is selected because she is the best with numbers. Katherine arrives at a building that, outside of Katherine, is full of white, middle-aged men. She has to win people over who both need her to succeed quickly but maybe aren’t ready to see an African-American female outperform them. Some of the men even go out of their way to make her feel out of place. Nothing is super blatant like the racism or discrimination we might see in a more adult movie from the same time period. Still, Katherine’s worth is definitely defined by a “what have you done for me recently” mentality. And, whereas others in The Space Test Group are given the benefit of the doubt for not always having the answer, there is a different standard placed on Katherine.
We do see some of the issues of the day at hand. For example, Katherine has to walk half a mile away to use a bathroom that she is allowed to use. There is a bathroom in the building she works in, but it is for white women only. When Harrison finds out that Katherine is gone for an hour at a time, some of the first steps towards desegregation at the NASA facilities are taken. And this, unfortunately, is where the movie becomes a bit cliche. If this were the first movie on desegregation or even one of the best ones, it would have been more impactful personally. This doesn’t take away from the quality of the movie. It just takes away from the impact on me if it had been the first of its kind. The achievements of these three women were extraordinary and what they had to overcome just because they were black women in the 1960s was commendable. The acting of Henson, Monae, and Spencer was top-notch, and while I wasn’t as moved as maybe the average moviegoer might have been, it might have been for that exact reason…I probably see more movies than 95% of the country. So while this wasn’t one of my favorite movies of the year, it was still a very well-made film and deserving of an Academy Award for Best Picture.
Over her three decades at NASA, Katherine Johnson’s biography includes impressive accomplishments. She calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard’s 1961 spaceflight, verified the calculations for John Glenn’s first American orbit, and computed the trajectory of Apollo 11’s flight to the moon. In addition, she worked on the plan that saved Apollo 13’s crew and brought them safely back to Earth. On November 24, 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Hidden Figures is a movie that most people are going to enjoy. It’s a movie appropriate for all ages, though I don’t know how much younger audiences will really enjoy it. The content is adult. I’m not sure younger people are going to appreciate the science components of the movie. Heck, I’m not sure older audiences would even understand that part. And as much as I don’t always like PG movies, I do appreciate it when you can tell a true story that a lot of people are going to allow and not make it PG-13 or R. Unless a movie is geared towards kids (which Hidden Figures is not), an R-rated movie is generally going to get a bigger draw. So I do give credit when you can tell this story and keep it appropriate for all ages. While PG movies generally aren’t my cup of tea, I can understand that I can be in the minority on this.
Plot 10/10
Character Development 9/10
Character Chemistry 9/10
Acting 9/10
Screenplay 9/10
Directing 9.5/10
Cinematography 9/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
91.5%